Saturday night, a dinner party in Northeast Portland, and someone's partner asks me what I do. I say brand strategist. He nods the way people nod at a phrase they have heard on a podcast. Then he asks what that actually means, and I watch myself spend forty seconds saying nothing.
Five years in. Agency side, then brand side. I have written positioning for companies whose annual revenue exceeds the budget of a mid-sized Oregon city, and I cannot finish one sentence about my own job before the guy reaches for the cheese board.
My dodges are well rehearsed by now. I help companies figure out what they stand for. I sit between marketing and the business. I do the thinking that happens before the ads. Every one of those is true and every one of them dies on contact with a normal human being holding a beer.
A profession whose practitioners cannot describe it in one sentence does not have a communication problem, it has a positioning problem, and yes, I hear it.
Three reasons we got here, and I have sat inside the rooms that made all three.
One, the work is invisible when it goes well. Nobody points at a good tagline and says, ah, someone spent six weeks deciding this company was a challenger and not a caretaker. They just think the line is nice.
Two, we borrowed our vocabulary from management consulting and never gave it back. Frameworks, pillars, architecture, equity. Words that sound expensive in a boardroom and absurd at a table with a roast chicken on it.
Three, and this is the real one, we are afraid the plain answer sounds small. If I say I help companies decide what they are so that everyone who works there stops guessing, that is a job a smart person could do without a deck. Which is correct. That is the job.
If I say I help companies decide what they are so that everyone who works there stops guessing, that is a job a smart person could do without a deck.
So I have started using the plain answer anyway. Three parties so far. Twice it landed, and once a man told me that sounded like something software would handle eventually, which, fine, maybe, get in line.
Wednesday I tried it on the karaoke host at the bar in Southeast that never quite dries out. He calls everyone baby. He listened, said baby, that is just being clear with people, and handed me the mic. Correct on both counts, and then I sang badly for four minutes.